It might seem like the main goal of integrating your live support software with your CRM is just to track tickets. While that’s an obvious value, the top benefits of live chat CRM integration are much bigger and more comprehensive.

Modern businesses thrive when they have complete customer knowledge, but information on its own is not enough. Successful SMBs use apps that fit their particular customer journeys. Integrating those must-have apps is always about two things: customer happiness and user happiness. If you can’t increase both, then you’re using the wrong integration.

That’s why we’ve made sure that ClickDesk’s live chat software integrates seamlessly with your favorite CRMs, including complete sales-and-marketing CRMs like Agile CRM, social CRMs like Nimble, and enterprise-level sales solutions like Salesforce.

Whether you’re trying to decide which CRM to use or you already have a favorite understanding how sales, marketing and support work together will help you to create more effective digital marketing strategies. When it comes to the top 4 reasons to integrate live chat with your CRM, we had a lot of benefits to choose from, so we focused on the most sustainable benefits — core functions that continue to provide value over time.

1. Customer Satisfaction

Do you truly believe in customer happiness? Then I’ll let you in on a little secret.

Customers want to trust you. They really do. But if you don’t recognize them, then that trust becomes nearly impossible. Integrating your live chat app with your CRM makes sure that agents, sales reps, and anybody else at your company who interacts with customers always has up-to-date customer profiles, including past chat transcripts.

2. Buyer Targeting

When you map out the customer journey with your product or service, do you focus on real data and web analytics, or do you make the common business mistake of treating buyer personas like buyer profiles, missing out on the “how, when and why” of buyer decisions?

Combining live chat with whatever customer relationship tools you’re using helps to target buyer interests. If your CRM inludes marketing automation, all the better! Then you can tag customers based on support conversations and run automated campaigns on them, targeting their specific interests with personalized discounts and content.

3. Increased Revenue

On its own, live chat has been shown to increase the likelihood of a sale as well as the average order size of those sales. When you integrate live chat with your CRM, you expand that benefit to include future revenue as well.

Customers have questions. At first, answering their questions as quickly and clearly as possible can simply keep you on track for your sales quotas. But when your CRM has access to your live support data, you’re sales team can respond dynamically and up-sell current customers based on both past behavior and future predictions, along with strategies for predictable revenue.

Customers with the toughest questions often also have the biggest pockets. If you ignore their questions, you risk stunting your business growth completely.

There’s also a hidden link to revenue. Integrated sales and support can do wonders for your marketing funnel. That point in the funnel where marketing gives over to sales is critical. It’s where things either get really good or go terribly awry, and integrating real-time customer support with your CRM ensures that sales teams have complete prospect histories available any time they speak with a prospect, which in turn means that prospects are never treated anonymously and far more likely to buy.

4. Brand Loyalty

A CRM is great from your sales team’s perspective because they can track new leads, manage lead scores, create repeatable deal pipelines, and more. But that doesn’t help build brand loyalty. A majority of your future business will come from customers you already have, and live chat is key to increasing customer retention.

When they see live chat on your website, customers know that you aren’t just a faceless business in the cloud. In fact, customers tend to stick with a company that offers live chat, even if they don’t actually take advantage of it. Just knowing that you’re available if they need you is enough.

And when they do need you, there you are, with a complete customer history just a click away.

Hint: If you really want to increase brand advocacy, focus your energy on social media integration, a natural way to connect the customer conversations across social media channels like Facebook and Twitter with customer profiles in your CRM. It’s an easy way to make sales, marketing and support feel natural and organic. Integrating social live chat with your CRM lets you focus on conversations instead of helpdesk tickets.

How are you using live chat and CRM for growth hacking and customer retention? Reach out on Twitter and let us know. Here at ClickDesk HQ, we love nothing more than hearing from our customers!